March 2004

The Night Land Maps
William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, published in 1912, is apparently a cult classic, with the usual fan-generated materials, including, notably (else why I would I mention?), maps. Jeff Patterson writes to point us to this page, which he describes…
Road Map of the Human Body
This illustration of the human body as a road map — veins and arteries appear as expressways, for example — seems to be a very, very neat medical illustration exercise (via Kottke and Muxway)….
Maps on Money
A 1632 map of Canada by Samuel de Champlain and a satellite image of the country are featured on the back of the new Canadian $100 bill, which went into circulation today (CBC)….
BNSF
And while I’m at it — boy, do my obsessions ever spill out on this site — here’s the system map for the modern-day Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. Map details are in PDF format and show stations and track…
Railroads in the Pacific Northwest
An extensive web site about the Great Northern Railway in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley includes reproductions of 1890s-era maps of railroads in the Pacific Northwest and early twentieth-century maps of the Fraser Valley region….
Generating GIS with PHP
Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into…
Fighting Crime with GIS
“[D]atabases of all types of crime, plotted on detailed local maps, have become a powerful new crime-fighting tool,” says a BBC report on the use of mapping technology by police in Britain. One example given: tracking arson by teens in…
Lost in Seattle
Lost in Seattle is an experiment I’d like to see repeated everywhere. It’s a clickable map of downtown Seattle that shows street-level businesses. I’ve seen this kind of detail on some maps, particularly of downtown commercial areas, but this is…
Hand-Drawn Maps
This is fascinating: a collection of hand-drawn maps — the sort that people giving someone directions scribble down on a scrap of paper or napkin. i collect personal maps people draw. one’s memory and perception of a place is very…
Scale Subway Systems
Subway systems of the world, presented at scale (via Kottke). I only know Paris’s system personally (see previous entries: Paris Metro, Maps as Mnemonic Aid — My Trip to Paris in 1997), and it looks like surface trams, but not…
Stephen King’s Maine
Stephen King’s official web site has a map of Maine that includes the fictional towns — like Castle Rock and Derry — from his works. It’s a popup from the Miscellany page….
Overland Maps
Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 (at the Library of Congress as Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869) has maps, including digital scans of a number of original maps from that period. (via Plep)…
Greenwood’s Map of London, 1827
I’ve posted enough maps of London here that I was sure that I had posted Greenwood’s Map of London, 1827 before, but apparently not. So here you go: an interactive version that allows you to click on individual panels to…
Mac Software Updates
MacMinute reported updates to desktop mapping and GPS software for the Macintosh yesterday: EarthDesk 2.5, which generates a realtime map of the Earth on your desktop; and MacGPS 5.0, third-party software for using (normally Windows-only) GPS receivers with a Mac….
Ikonos Satellite Image Galleries
Space Imaging presents what they call the top ten Ikonos satellite images for 2003 (via MetaFilter). And there’s some more neat stuff in their gallery (also via MetaFilter)….
Community Mapping Assistance Project
Non-profit community groups do not have the same research resources that governments and corporate entities do. As far as mapping and GIS data is concerned, the New York Public Interest Research Group is trying to change that with its Community…